


Expected

by just_your_biology



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-03
Updated: 2018-04-03
Packaged: 2019-04-17 17:58:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14194539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/just_your_biology/pseuds/just_your_biology
Summary: It's been over ten years since Lucretia had seen her friends. Over ten years, excluding fifteen minutes ago.





	Expected

**Author's Note:**

> A short study of Lucretia Adventurezone! Takes place during the second half of Moonlighting: Chapter 3. This is my first fic on here, so sorry if the voice is a little awkward.

It wasn’t like you weren’t expecting it, thought Lucretia, as her heels clicked along the floor tiles, carrying her towards her quarters. Her steps were quick, hurried, despite the fact she had nothing to fear, nothing to run from. 'Nothing but the damned Hunger at least.'

It was ridiculous, she knew, to be so worked up after so long. She had prepared for this, worried and planned and staged encounters. She had known what it would be like, she had  
known it would be hard.

Still, she could hardly be blamed. She hadn’t seen them in over ten years, and hadn’t lied to their faces in- well, over ten years. The charade was one she often played, one she knew as well as the Bureau’s halls. But this time, this time it hurt. It was one thing to tell strangers half-truths that gave them a cause to fight for, and quite another to tell her three old friends lies about the mission they themselves had put so much into.

They had been there again, Lucretia and Taako and Magnus and Merle and Davenport. But with the story so changed, the roles reversed, and the absence of Barry and Lup that felt as tangible as their presences had been. And, of course, it was all her fault.

She reached the end of the hallway, and took out her key to unlock the big oak door to her room. The first thing she saw when she stepped inside was Junior in their tank, floating to one side with tendrils pressed against the glass. Lucretia held her hand up to them, moved it around slowly, watching as the little voidfish swam to follow her palm. They sang a little song of high, cosmic notes. The edges of Lucretia’s mouth twitched upwards in a sad smile.

Lucretia knew she was responsible. She knew the forgetting and the separation and a fair amount of the pain was all her fault. And still, she didn’t regret it. She could have done it better, maybe, maybe telling Taako or Merle or Barry would have worked, maybe she could’ve inoculated them all. But she hadn't. It had been twelve years, and now she was closer to defeating the Hunger then they’d ever been.

Lucretia sat down on her bed, collapsing into an undignified position and propping the Bulwark Staff on the corner of her desk. She rubbed her forehead, wondering at the state she had finally found herself in. 

There was no worldwide conflict this time. She made sure that no entire plane would be destroyed, this time. No fuss, no great unrest, minimal casualties. Only oblivion, only ignorance, only Lucretia with the world on her shoulders and no one to know about it. That’s what she’d said to herself, more than once in a decade. But today, that had changed. Today, she had brought her old friends into it.

She had gone through the motions. She'd told them the story about the evil Red Robes and the mystifying Relic Wars and minimal information. She saw how they had changed, in the years since she had saw them in person. Magnus, with his commoner backstory and big gruff nonchalance and awe at a place as grand as the Bureau. Merle, a deadbeat dad running from his past, not understanding why the people around him don’t immediately open up, your run-of-the-mill beach dwarf. And, most sadly, Taako, distrusting and scowling, a boy who thinks he’s always been alone, the gaping hole with the absence of his sister beside him. Lucretia had thought there wouldn’t be consequences, after she fed the journals to Fisher. She thought they’d be happy, carefree, not knowing enough to worry about the fate of the universe. She was so wrong, and Davenport, standing at her side, unable to speak, was living proof of that.

But Lucretia couldn’t fix that now. She was so close, with two of the Relics sitting on the corner of her desk. Two-sevenths of the way there, and possibility of the rest closer than they’d been since the Relic Wars. She didn’t want to put the boys in danger, that was the whole point of making them forget. But she needed Reclaimers, she needed to get the light before it was too late, and Lucretia now knew that the only way to do that was with these three. After nearly a year trying, she simply had had to accept that she couldn’t trust anyone from Faerune to get the Relics for her, no matter how good at heart. She’d lost Brian today, sweet Magic Brian with his hospitality and pet spiders and hope for peace. No, it would have to be one of them, one of the seven who had spent a century already chasing down the light, the ones who the arrows always kept pointing towards.

Lucretia would have done it herself, ventured into the land and found the objects, but she knew she couldn’t do that. Not after Wonderland, with the wicked smiles and the years and memories taken from her. She’d given up hunting in the field not long after the Felicity Wilds. But if not her, then who? Lup was gone, lost to an unforgiving world, dead even though she couldn’t truly die. Davenport surely couldn’t search, the strain of the mission, coupled with the sight of another relic, might literally break his head in two, disintegrate his vision to only static. So, of course she had to call upon the others, and do her best to keep them safe. That, of course, meant more lying and scheming, meant pretending she was a stranger and that she had a noble cause, meant hiding more behind her back and a daily confrontation with her past. But, she did it. Of course she did. Barry had fled, crushed by fire and doubtlessly gone into lich form and his caves by now. But, fifteen minutes ago, she had stood before her old friends as Madame Director.

And now they were Reclaimers. They were in her moon base, inoculated by the fish that was once Magnus’s, wearing her symbol, and oblivious to their shared past, and her regret.


End file.
